BuddyPress.org

@avaiya,
you do not have to be friends to send a private message.

Choose – Messages – Compose and Send To (Username or Friend’s Name)

Ah, interesting.

1. If you’ve got access (through the mysql command line tool, or through PHPMyAdmin, check the character set and collation https://makandracards.com/makandra/2531-show-the-character-set-and-the-collation-of-your-mysql-tables There may be something funny going on there.

2. Do you have the same problem with other content? Can you post a private message with a special character in the subject line? A blog post with a special character in the title?

These items will help narrow down whether it’s a problem with bp-groups, or a database-level config issue.

BuddyPress’s Register page is a special kind of page that cannot be edited via the Dashboard. That’s why it’s blank when you view it in the normal way.

To add additional fields to the registration process, go to Dashboard > Users > Profile Fields. Add one for Address and one for Phone Number. Make them required and/or private, if you’d like. As long as they are part of the ‘Base’ profile field group, they will appear as part of the registration process.

Thanks. I’ve just installed the combination of rename-wp-login and lh-private-buddypress, and I’m unable to reproduce the problem – after logging in, I’m being redirected to the originally-requested page. It may still be worth a test on your end; if temporarily disabling rename-wp-login fixes the problem, it would at least narrow down what’s going on.

If it were my site, the next thing I’d do is to debug the redirection chain, but I’m unsure how familiar/comfortable you are with debugging PHP functions. Try adding the following settings to your wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );

After a few pageloads, WP should have created a file at wp-content/debug.log. Once you’ve confirmed this, drop the following into a bp-custom.php file, and then run through the login redirect process. It’ll dump some info into your debug.log file, which we can use for further debugging.

add_filter( 'wp_redirect', function( $redirect ) {
    error_log( print_r( debug_backtrace(), true ) );
    return $redirect;
} );

If you don’t see anything in your cookies, then that’s the source of the problem. BP uses cookies to indicate that you’re moving through the group creation process, and if it doesn’t see these cookies, it sends you back to the first step.

So, the question is why those cookies aren’t being set. Things to look at:

1. I assume that at least some cookies are being set on your site, or you wouldn’t be able to log in 🙂 Are other BP-related cookies working? For example, if you go to the group directory and change the “Order by” dropdown to, say, “Newly Created”, is a browser cookie created bp-groups-scope? A quick test is to do a hard-refresh of the groups directory, and see if your selection sticks.

2. If other cookies are being set, it could be a path-related issue. Have you set a custom COOKIEPATH in your wp-config.php file? It could be that cookies are being set in such a way that they’re inaccessible to certain pages of the group creation process.

3. Have you tried in other browsers? Or in private browsing windows? It could be that this is being triggered by privacy settings of one sort or anotheer.

4. You showed some WP_DEBUG errors that (as you surmise) are unrelated to the problem. Are those shown when you first visit the group creation page, or *after* you’ve submitted the first step? It’s the submission process I’m concerned about, since the groups aren’t being created in the first place.

Hi @plumbingsuperstore – Oof, sorry to hear about the problems, but glad your hosting provider had a way to roll back.

BuddyPress doesn’t touch user credentials, so it’s highly unlikely that BuddyPress itself would be the cause of your admin creds not working after BP was installed. I’m guessing that either there’s some user error here, or there’s another plugin interfering with the process. To reiterate, logging into WP should be exactly the same before or after the activation of BP.

Regarding the 404 error when activating your account: When you install BuddyPress, it should create pages called Register and Activate. It sounds like this worked for Register (since you were able to register a new account), but didn’t for Activate. If you try this again, take careful note of the URLs you see in your browser when registering, the URL that appears in the activation email, and the URL you see in the browser after clicking the activation link. There could be a clue here.

One final tip: You can stay logged in as an admin in your browser and still test as another user. Open a private browsing window: Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/private-browsing-use-firefox-without-history, Chrome https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en, Safari https://www.macworld.com/article/1133941/software-web/safariprivate.html

It looks, at a glance, like the LH Private BuddyPress plugin ought to be doing what you’re asking for. https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/lh-private-buddypress/trunk/lh-private-buddypress.php#L101

If it’s not working, it’s either because of an error in the plugin logic, or because something on your server or WP setup is interfering with the redirect_to parameter.

Can you share the format of the URL at various points of the process? For example, when visiting example.com/groups/my-private-group as a logged-out user, you should be redirected to:

example.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=/groups/my-private-group

If, after login, you’re being redirected back to wp-login.php, what is the format of the URL then?

What is the URL format of your BP/WP installation? Are you installed at the top level of a domain example.com or in a subdirectory example.com/buddypress/?

Hi @aubreyw – The email should show up immediately. If it’s not, the places you should check are:

1. Is any email being sent from your server? For example, do BP emails (like private message notifications) show up? How about other WP notifications, like a password reset?

2. Check your spam folders (which it sounds like you’ve already done)

It’s possible to manually trigger the activation of a changed email address, but it sounds like the more fundamental problem here is that emails aren’t working properly, so it seems better to try to address that problem first.